GM's Tip of the Week

I’m going to take a closer look at character classes for a few weeks, and I decided to start with paladins. Buckle up, folks, it’s gonna be a bumpy ride…

Not many classes provoke as much party-based drama and strife as the badly-played paladin, and very few people can play paladins without getting embroiled into Alignment or Code of Honour based arguments, either with you or the rest of the group.

Such arguments frequently involve the dreaded phrase, ‘I’m just playing my alignment!’ or some variant thereof, and for a stereotypical group of murder-hobos, a paladin is frequently a massive pain in the neck, not worth their class abilities. And then there’s the near-constant temptation of the GM to set up Kobayashi Maru settings wherein the paladin player is forced to make horrible decisions that will probably result in a paladin who has lost his powers.

Now, you as the GM should never let yourself set up situations wherein the paladin has to make a decision between upholding their code (and thus, keeping their powers) and ‘doing the right thing’, whatever that means in the given situation. That kind of thing is cruel and unnecessary, and no one should do it.

In the same realm, a group should not be going out of their way to put the paladin’s player in situations that will cause strife; that too is rude and unnecessary.

Neither should the paladin’s player be attempting to run the group by Holy Writ; that is just as rude and unnecessary as the first two.

Which essentially means, where this has not already been spelled out (I know Paizo actually wrote out a collection of oaths that various deities insist on their paladins swearing), that you and the paladin player should sit down with the deity in question, their pantheon and general description and write out a list of things the paladin has to do in order to be considered Sticking To Their Oath. Make sure you also have a copy of that list; you’ll want it.

Some effort should be taken to ensure that the rest of the group is also on board, naturally …

Doing these things won’t take care of all of the drama, but it will remove the usual sources, and give everybody an idea of what’s going on, what will and will not be tolerated .. and remember! Communication. Reasoned and reasonable discussion will solve the vast majority of your problems before they get to the stage of group destruction.